I asked Charlie Munger what he thought of Jeff Bezos, and he told me that Bezos was ferociously intelligent.
In this book, Buffett calls Bezos a miracle worker.
And something that Bezos had in common with Munger and Buffett is from day one.
In his very first shareholder letter, Jeff Bezos emphasized the importance of having the very best team.
He wrote, setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been and will continue to be the single most important element of Amazon's success.
Big Bezos's focus on talent is just like this quote from Steve Jobs that happened in an interview that Steve gave the very same year in 1997.
And Steve said, I think that I've consistently figured out who the really smart people are to hang around with.
You must find extraordinary people.
The key observation is that in most things in life, the dynamic range.
You'll hear me repeat that over and over again in this episode.
The dynamic range between the average quality and the best quality is at most 2 to 1.
But in the field that I was interested in, I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to 1.
So given that, you're well advised to go after the cream of the cream and to build a team that pursues the A plus players.
And that is exactly what Ramp did.
Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry.
Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible.
In the last 12 months, they've hired only 0.23% of the people that applied.
This means when you use Ramp, you now have top tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers working on your behalf 24,7 to automate and improve all of your business's financial operations.
And they do this on a single platform, which means the longer that you use Ramp, the more efficient your company becomes.
That is very important because as Sam Walton said in his autobiography, you can still make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation.